A few years ago I woke up early one Sunday morning and went to Mass. It had been a quarter century and even today I am unsure why I choose to go. After that first Sunday I decided I wanted to take communion so I went to confession the next Saturday night as prescribed by the church.  It was hard to walk into that confessional but I got off easy since I probably broke every Commandment except the 6th and 7th; Father Neville just seemed to be happy that I had returned and welcomed me with open arms. It was strange, foreign yet familiar, and I was scared because I was forgiving God for the many injustices I felt I’d endured at his hand. I was raised Roman Catholic, mostly by my Grandmother, but had left the church when I was 13. My mother was angry at God for the death of my cousin and I was angry at God for letting my cousin molest me. The devotion of my maternal grandmother, praying novenas for me year after year, was awe-inspiring but, she loved the perceived monster that was my cousin more than me. Or, so I thought. I didn’t understand so I blamed God, turning my back on the community and comfort of the church in favor of self-loathing, drugs, and sex.

Six years ago I walked away from the altered spaces I had dwelled in for 20+ years. I sobered up and began to grow up, finally maturing emotionally from the 13-year-old I was when I chose to numb the pain of my childhood with drugs. My body had become that of a man but my head was still an angry kid who was lashing out at the world. It took a lot of painful soul-searching, the dissolution of my marriage and forgiving God to finally be a whole person.

The soul-searching was in short a complete psychological reevaluation of everything I believed. It made me see that I was a selfish, narcissistic person who had latched onto a culture that seemed, at the time, to provide me with warmth and companionship. It didn’t judge me and kept me in the stagnant pool of thought that says it’s ok to ‘follow your heart’. You should be true to yourself but when you have children there comes a sense of duty that must be embraced. This sense of duty informed me that just doing whatever you wanted in the name of happiness was not the right way, that escapism was secondary to my daughters needs, and that I need to do things for them that I wouldn’t do for myself.

I didn’t plan on quitting drugs, I woke up one morning and didn‘t get high, went about my day and went to bed. I woke up the next day, didn’t get high….  After about a month I didn’t even think about getting high. This is when my life fell apart. I looked at my wife one day and realized I didn’t know who she was. Our relationship began with a bottle of vodka and a oxycodon and was a blur of cocaine and alcohol, it ended one Monday in July 2008 when she left.

She wouldn’t let go of her past, she resented being married and her ‘boring’ life. She wanted to be a woman in her twenties, out and about on the town, making the scene. Her life inevitably changed for the worst in her eyes by getting married. The sense of this was palpable and she sought out what I had walked away from in a person who would let her be ‘true’ to herself. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t join me so I immersed myself in my children’s lives and became detached from her; I looked on her as a manifestation of everything I had rebuked. It caused a war within me. I knew that it was best for my wife and me to be together for our children, but if we lived two separate lives it would never work. She felt it too and decided that it was better for her to just run from our problems as opposed to trying to fix them.

It took a long time to find some peace and comfort, I spun up and down through the grieving process for over a year; from anger, to bargaining, to denial, to depression until I finally found acceptance. I studied Buddhism and it showed me many ways to forgive her for the perceived violations she had committed against me and our children but, it took forgiving God to ultimately free me from the past. I had to struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, to do this and the way came to me when reading a book called Strong Fathers / Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker. There is a chapter on God. The author is relating what a woman who survived Auschwitz said about God.

“God didn’t make the camp or kill the Jews. The mistake He made was giving men free will and the brains to figure out how to torture people. I knew that He hated Auschwitz more than I did. Many of us had faith. We needed hope. Whether we made it out alive or not, we needed to know that somehow, some way, life would be better. Would it be heaven? We didn’t know what we thought. But God gave me hope and that kept me alive. I couldn’t afford wasting energy on hating Him.”

From there I ended up going to mass one Sunday. It was comforting and I found giving myself to God, thinking about what they said, being absorbed in the ritual, was liberating.  I have found this is a way to stay focused on the challenges of my life as a single father. I find that it also helps me to know that there is a community for me, one that expects things of me beyond ‘following my heart’.  Ultimately, though, there is another reason for going, an admittedly selfish one,  my daughters and their right to know God.

It is said that talking to your children about religion is second only to talking about sex on the uncomfortably scale. I don’t have a problem saying what I need about either thing to my girls but, I feel that living by example is the greatest way to reinforce in them that God is there and loves them. They need to be taught a faith in God, because life will inevitably take them to a place where I can not help them. Do I want them to be alone when they are there, feeling emotionally rejected, abandoned, and misunderstood, or willing and able to put their trust in something greater than themselves? Where will they find security then, will they have something strong, loving, and secure to hold them? I know that I will not always be there for them and I want to give them something to turn to other than drugs or sex like I did.

My years away from the church lead me down many dark roads. I felt death wrap its hands around me more than once as I tried to drown my pain. The moral compass in myself, something felt and believed, but unbacked by the foundation found in organized religion worked for a time. The notion that I didn’t need a book or holy man to tell me I was a good person stood paramount so I turned my back on the whole idea and found spirituality in other ways; a blade of grass, the last rose of summer, a song.  As long as I was living in an altered space those things were enough. In the world outside that cocoon they weren’t and I now know if I am to embrace the truth of my religion, to find the peace it offers, I must embrace all of it and above all have faith in God’s plan for me.